


Adjacent Alignment

by teaflings



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Post-Canon, The Drift (Pacific Rim), little bit of a character study little bit an exploration of drift/kaiju-related nightmares, technically newt/hermann
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 00:47:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14153013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teaflings/pseuds/teaflings
Summary: When Hermann pulls open the door with a half-snarled, “What?” muffled through the handkerchief covering most of his face to see Newton standing there, he is, as he so often is when faced with Newton, filled with regret.“Um,” Newton says. “Can I come in?”“Oh,” Hermann says. “Yes.”





	Adjacent Alignment

The thing—

The thing is that they do try.

 

They put ice and claws and a desire for destruction in his head too, and he didn’t notice then, because Newton — the thought of Newton — pulled it out.

 

He realizes that too late, in the horrible 20/20 high-definition clarity that retrospectivity brings, once the sunglasses are off and the ache of the bruises around his throat abates, when he looks at Newton through a one-way mirror and watches his head swivel around to meet his gaze through the mirrored glass with uncanny precision, blue rimmed with bloody scleras. Newton operates with uncanny precision, he knows, but it has been hidden behind too-loud music and a carefully careless disregard for lab safety protocols and modern bureaucracy for over nineteen years now and Hermann doesn't wish that he had been better at seeing through the messy winks accompanying the “call me Newt!” because he had seen through them, but—

They told him that he would be happier going along with what they wanted, because Newton would be there beside him.

Hermann is the one that said no, the one that stayed, the one that sent letters and voicemails and emails, but he still feels guilty for having left Newton.

He wonders if Newton feels anything for what he did.

He doesn’t know what he wants from the past.

 

Back then, the two of them do not technically go to the party, one half celebration of continued survival and half a wake, because Hermann does know that alcohol and seizures do not mix well, thank you _very much_ , and he doubts that Newton mixes very well with parties in general. They only technically do not go because this is not the sort of gathering that confines itself to a room or two. It spills out over the floor of the hanger bay and into the hallways that they are walking through, and Hermann has to redirect some of the effort he is using to keep Newton moving to keeping people from handing him various bottles and glasses, some alarmingly obviously scavenged from the Shatterdome cafeteria.

Newton is not much more unfocused than he tends to be, but the man is cycling through topics of conversation alarmingly quickly, and Hermann is, has been, and always will be the more responsible of the two, and so he reroutes them towards the nearest holder of a _medical_ doctorate. He  chatters on about how this party is _happening, dude_ , and it is the most _killer_ of after-parties, and Hermann winces, silently willing him to cease saying these things in front of the people that have doubtlessly lost more than they have in this war.

They manage to make it to Medical, and Newt does not manage to obtain any amount of alcohol from a multitude of passing PPDC employees, although not for lack of trying. He has not stopped talking, much to Hermann’s chagrin, but his arm is still slung around Hermann’s shoulders and he’s gone significantly more ashy. Hermann would be willing to put money on his ability to seemingly will himself to remain in a conscious state cutting out abruptly within the next quarter hour, but a med tech relieves him of his lab partner before that happens.

Hermann is left alone, sitting in what passes for an atrociously grimy medical office with an inexplicable urge to spin himself in circles on the chair that he has been loaned. The door to this room is shut, and it is steel and more importantly thick enough to block out most outside sounds. His chair squeaks when he shifts his weight, trying to keep his knee and hip from reminding him that he spent a good amount of time running around both Hong Kong and the Shatterdome.

Hermann isn’t sure what he will do now.

He wants to make sure that Newton is alright.

He wants to make sure that this planet will remain his planet.

He supposes he will wait for Newton to be finished with the medical staff, but the technician that gave him his chair keeps peeking through the tiny window in the door, and somehow that seems a little off, a little threatening. He pushes down the following wave of suspicion when he can’t determine its source, but he feels— he feels the way Newton felt during his first doctorate, too carefully watched, itchy and uneasy. For a moment he feels claustrophobic, haunted and hunted by thin gossamer strands of broken metal fibers — _and blue_ — and ghosts, but by now he is certain that this Shatterdome will carry a weight too heavy to be comfortable for any of them much longer.

He should go find one of his tablets, read or write a handful of emails, but he remains here in his squeaky chair and refuses to reorder the unordered papers that the technician has left on the desk. That is a prototypically Gottliebian impulse, he knows, and he has to dredge up why that particular thought feels significant before he realizes that Newton is fond of chair-spinning on the rare occasions in which he manages to sit down at his desk instead of hovering over his research notes like some kind of deranged hornet. For a moment, Hermann is _extremely_ unhappy with Caitlin Lightcap for structuring the PONS equipment around a double neural load the way that she did, but he tells himself to poke at the mess in front of him to distract himself from his now-conflicting opinions towards his chair, and his _entirely unfounded_ passing dislike of the woman that invented the technology that the PPDC used to save the world.

The papers scattered over the desk are freshly printed off orders for various types of neuroimaging for one Newton Geiszler, PhDs. He doesn’t smile when he sees the -s tacked on, even though the room is empty of people and he wants to, tells himself that he is appalled at being _fondly_ reminded of his colleague’s entirely inane academic history.

He shakes himself out of the memory of writing a letter years ago, and back into the present. He supposes he should get the same imaging done, but he is content to wait until he is in a slightly more adequate facility. Hermann doesn’t feel like he is actively bleeding anywhere, and for now that will do. He has not had a seizure, cannot imagine that laying in a medical facility for any amount of time will do him or his aching leg any favors, and something tells him that the technicians currently here are the ones without the rank or seniority to get themselves into rooms closer to the alcohol.

Hermann wants to go find Newton, wants to make sure that he is alright. He only vaguely wants to grab him by the scruff of his neck or his filthy jacket, drag him back to this room and shake him until he apologizes for infecting those around him with the _utterly_ childish desire to misuse desk chairs, but the itch at the back of his mind is back and this is taking too long and he _cannot sit still any longer_.

He will settle for painkillers and a nap.

He sighs.

He gets up, and against what feel like his better instincts, leaves the office and its terrible chair behind.

 

The hallways are still busy with people in varying stages of intoxication, and so Hermann grits his teeth against the noise and the bustle, holds his cane tighter than he should be, and does his best to stick to the sides of the corridors, where he will hopefully not be jostled as often.

Someone he does not quite recognize hands him an entire unopened bottle of sake in passing and he nearly drops it before he can detach himself from his cane in a way that will leave him and the bottle upright. The glass is bright pink and the thing looks like something from before rationing was as strict as it is now. He tries to pass it off to some kid from Tendo’s division, sure that will taste entirely atrocious, but she laughs him off, waving something in a much more reasonably brown bottle at him before she continues on her way.

He does not _want_ the sake, does not _need_ the sake. Currently, Hermann needs and wants to _sleep_.

The fluorescent lights above him flicker and he flinches as _shaking-dust-rumble-blue_ snap through his mind.

Hermann does drop the sake this time, and the bottle splinters across the floor. He missteps onto his bad leg as he recovers from his flinch and nearly follows it, cane slipping on the concrete below him as he tries to right himself. Someone says, “Doctor Gottlieb, are you alright?” and grabs his elbow before he can hit the floor, but he barely hears them, too fixated on the nausea puddling in his stomach along with the last few drops of adrenaline that he is currently capable of producing.

“I am fine,” he snaps, pulling his arm free even though is not quite steady yet, but he doesn’t fall again, and he doesn’t throw up either.

He finds himself in a hallway.

The lights flicker again, and he tenses, waits for _blue_ that he does not remember, not really, to cut through his thoughts again, but nothing happens.

There are people near him, someone with his arms still stretched out towards him and several others hesitantly frozen a few more steps away. “I am _fine_ ,” he repeats, just as acridly, and the man that had caught him laughs.

“It is probably for the best that you dropped that,” he says, just a little slurred, “you look like you’ve had plenty already.”

Hermann nudges some of the glass on the ground with the edge of his foot instead of replying and immediately regrets it when he shifts and feels a slight stickiness catch the bottom of his shoes.

“Oh, someone will clean it up in the morning,” a younger woman in a dark blue and oil- flecked jumpsuit assures him.

“Go get some water in you,” the man says, still friendly, and as Hermann’s heart rate returns to something that more closely approaches normal he feels the slightest touch of regret for snapping at the group.

“Thank you,” he says, painfully stiff. They wave at him and he waits for them to turn away before he braces himself against the wall.

 _I am in a hallway,_ he thinks, _everything is fine. This is the Shatterdome, I am in Hong Kong, and the breach is closed. The breach is closed_. Flakes of rust come with his hand when he lifts it from the wall and he grimaces.

He finds the door to his room, mercifully close, and unlocks it.

Hermann still feels wrong, slightly nauseous and tired in a way that is making his vision swim, so after he shuts his door he lets himself slide down the wall.

He has never felt so tired in his life. His leg hurts, which is, as always, to be expected, but most of his bones ache  and his head is throbbing. He hopes his eye does not look as poorly as Newton’s did but doubts that it will. From his current position on the floor, Hermann cannot see himself in the mirror across the room and he doesn’t particularly want to get up to check.

He vaguely recalls that he probably shouldn’t be on the floor at all, much less about to be sleeping there. Hermann tells himself that this is a temporary break, that he will very much feel sorry for himself in the morning if he stays down here, and that gets him moving enough to situate himself and his cane into a configuration that will assist rather than hinder him in standing up.

It takes him an embarrassing amount of time to make it to the sink, but he gets there. Eventually.

Hermann’s eye is bloodshot and he looks like he’s been crawling through garbage for the past couple hours, so before he can think better of it he turns the water on to full and shoves his head under the stream. It’s cold and he sputters a bit, narrowly managing to avoid smacking his head into the faucet. When he comes up again, he doesn’t look much better, but his mind feels a little clearer and when he reaches out to grab a towel, Hermann finds that his hands are not shaking as much as they were.

 _Baby steps_ , he thinks, and rolls his eyes at his reflection until he looks suitably disapproving again.

His hair is towel-dried, his bottle of over-the-counter painkillers is located and a pill is taken, and then he is just about done with being awake as he finishes pulling off his sweater, so Hermann decides that he can wash and subsequently sterilize and/or incinerate his bedding and remaining clothing in the morning and lets himself drop into bed, too tired to adhere to his usual routine.

 

He barely notices when he shuts his eyes, but when he opens them Hermann is in a dimly lit room. It takes him a second or two to adjust to the light, and he isn’t sure how it got turned on, because he, like any _reasonable_ person, sleeps with the lights off.

Hermann is also not sure how he got back onto the floor after the amount of effort he just put into getting up, but he is definitely up close and personal with the ground.

The dim lights flicker, and when they come back on _he knows where he is._

The room is empty, but it is definitely one of the underground kaiju shelters in Hong Kong, why is it empty, he is on his knees, something is wrong, something is very wrong and he is looking for his glasses, he scrabbling around in the dirt as best he can but he cannot see and he is, oh God, _oh Gott,_ he is—

The ceiling shakes.

Dust falls into his eyes and then all around him there is a terrible, terrible rumbling and he does not fit right inside his own skin because there is a sudden sense of _something_ all around him, a presence sharp and archaic and alien, and when the roof caves in around him he is still alone and there is something reaching out and it is violently _blue_ and he is alone and then she is here, _Otachi is here_ and—

—and he jerks awake, shuddering, one hand clutching at his chest and the other at his head.

 _Oh dear_.

Hermann checks the time. He has been asleep for a little over an hour.

He watches the seconds tick by into minutes on the fuzzy and too-small LED display of the PPDC-issued clock. He waits for his breathing to slow, still tired but not entirely convinced that he’ll be able to fall asleep again.

His nose itches, and when Hermann goes to scratch it he finds that his nose has started bleeding again, so he sighs and sits up properly, Swinging his legs over the side of the bed results in his hip flaring up again, but the taste of copper in the back of his throat is growing stronger, and he will, as Newton tends to put it, _deal with it_ if it means he can avoid bleeding over everything.

Hermann stands up, intending to find a handkerchief, but despite pinching his nose and tipping his head back once he is upright and has turned on the lights, he proceeds to get blood on both his hands, his cane, and his table before he finds something to hold to his face.

 _This is entirely ridiculous_ , Hermann thinks and realizes that he still feels exceptionally grubby about halfway through getting the blood on his things off, so he gives up on his attempt at damage control and goes to shower instead.

 

While in the shower, he gets a flash of the smell of the ocean. It lasts for less than a full second, but brine replaces the lingering coppery tinge in the back of his throat before the smell of the water returns to normal. Shatterdome water has always been highly chlorinated, and when he rinses off his hair again before turning the water off, it smells so much like a public pool again that he can tell himself that he is exhausted and is simply imagining things.

 

Hermann still has his headache, a sharp pain pushing at the back of his eyes, and he really has had enough of it. He considers taking one of the pills prescribed for the days on which his leg is particularly bad, but the thought of feeling fuzzy for the next eight hours in unappealing enough that he decides that he would be better off trying another one of the non-prescription pills.

He put the bottle down with his other medications earlier, and when he picks it up again now, Hermann has to squint at the label to determine whether or not this is the right one, holding it at a distance wholly inappropriate for reading, because he has _somehow_ managed to misplace his glasses. Perhaps Newton will know where they went, but for now—

The spare pair is sitting on his desk in the lab.

Not having his glasses on him is making his skin crawl.

_He needs to find his glasses he needs to get—_

No.

Hermann does not need to do anything. He shoves down the sudden surge of panic, not sure where it came from.

He wishes that he had his glasses.

The lab should have something he can borrow to properly disinfect his table and his cane.

The lab also has his desk and his work, which should provide a suitable distraction from whatever is happening to him. Hermann has heard plenty on the subject of ghost Drifting, but even the years spent around pilot pairs weren’t enough to _truly_ convince him of the existence of a lasting connection. _Has he been mislabeling this as tiredness? Could this just be his brain working through the integration of what Newton had shared with him during their Drift?_ Hermann wonders, but he spends his time writing code and putting together predictive models, not listening to pilot gossip or neuroscientists, and so he cannot work out an answer that he finds satisfactory.

He shakes his head and pulls himself into his coat, puts on a pair of shoes that have not been walked through a puddle of bad alcohol, and leaves for the lab.

 

Hermann walks through the smaller corridors this time, cane clicking on the floor. It’s fairly quiet now, and he sacrifices efficiency in favor avoiding the larger groups of people still up. The pressure behind his eyes builds as he goes, but his nose does not begin to bleed again, and while he thinks that he would fine with losing a little more blood if he could trade it for his headache, it has not gotten to a point where it has become unmanageable. He will visit Medical once he has slept for a more proper amount of time, and until then this will have to do.

The series of hallways that he has chosen are quiet and nearly empty. A handful of people pass him, their voices echoing as they turn the corner behind him, but Hermann is otherwise alone. The air on the lowest levels of the ‘dome is cool and vaguely damp, and it feels enough like walking through a tomb that takes him a second or two to remember that they have closed the Breach, they have _won_ , that none of them will have to face another kaiju again.

The door to the lab opens easily. Hermann walks towards his desk, already looking for his glasses, when he sees the sickly green glow of one of Newton’s specimen tanks out of the corner of his eye. He turns towards it and immediately has to run for the trash can by his desk.

He throws up bile.

The section of kaiju floats there, not moving, half silhouetted and fully fluorescent, and thinking about it makes Hermann retch again. He feels seasick, like the floor of the lab is moving under him, and on his next shuddering inhale, the smell of the ocean fills the room around him.

His hand on the edge of the desk — _his hand is curled around the edge of a boat —_ for support, _— as the water moves beneath him —_ he straightens up again — _and he looks up_ — to carefully chance another look at Newton’s tanks — _and sees a sky above him, too dark and too red to be Earth’s, and he turns his head and looks directly into a sun large and swollen, like an infected eye with some moon or planetoid or an alien construct for a pupil, it is burning and he knows- so is Gypsy Danger’s core, but he blinks and in the imperfect and tumescent photo-bleached spot on his retinas there is a figure, something with too many eyes and too many spider-like limbs —_ but he — _but it_ — can’t — _shifts, ever so slightly, and a parabolic thread of bluish lighting sparks from it and suddenly reflects off of Newton’s glasses and he has not moved, has not blinked, but now Newton stands before him, next to him, eyes luminously blue and sharp behind slightly smudged glass and —_ he can’t move, stuck there with the tank and its green preservative dimly illuminating the space around him for what feels like an eternity, time moving too slowly through syrupy-slow air, until — _he smiles at him, far too kindly for the landscape around them, for the spines on the parabolic cartilaginous lines framing him against the boiling sun, but Newt takes his hand, ever-so gently, and when Hermann doesn’t pull away he smiles and —_ he has a vision of two Newtons in his field of view, expressions overlapping, one wearing sunglasses and hair that is messier than ever and — _his nose starts to leak blood bluer than his eyes and Hermann feels so very at peace, a whole and perfect person here with the burning sky above him and Newton’s hand in his own, he has seen this under a blue sky in his own thoughts and in the Drift, where he could pretend that he couldn’t tell whose mind it came from, but_ — his hands are curled around Hermann’s collar and — _something is wrong —_ he is shaking him, slightly but desperately, saying, “ _Hermann_? — Hermann! _”_ with two voices overlayed in stereophonic sound — _and he realizes that it must not come to this, it must never come to this and something hisses with fury and—_

“Newton?” he asks, and his voice is raspy and half gone so he tries again and says, “Newt?”

Newton’s eyebrows lift above his glasses in what might be relief for the briefest moment before his expression contorts back to worry and he says, “Are you okay?”

Hermann brings his hands up to frame Newton’s face, double-checks the lack of bioluminescent blood under his nose and sighs. Newton looks twice as tired as he feels, and Hermann abruptly feels guilt wrap around his throat at the thought of stressing him out further.

“Quite alright,” he tells him, “I was just, ah, lost in my own thoughts for a bit.”

Newton laughs, and it sounds high and forced and still nervous. “Must have been pretty spaced out there, bud. I was shouting at you for a bit.” He pats the hand that Hermann has forgotten to remove from his face, and Hermann startles and redirects into the version of himself that he prefers, the one that is crisp and efficient and doesn’t do things like grab his colleagues’ faces.

He hopes that Newton is not thinking too hard about what he just walked in on, smiles, lets go of Newt’s face, and says, “You are always shouting.”

Hermann can’t tell for sure behind the tinted glasses, but he thinks that Newton’s eyes have narrowed, and he’s frowning slightly in the way that he does when one of his enzymes have failed to catalyze a reaction in some tissue sample.

“How are your eyes?” he tries again.

Newton flicks his sunglasses up with a movement that would look practiced if not for the tremor in his hands. “Sore,” he admits, and his irises are ringed in blood but they are their regular shade of green, and something in Hermann relaxes at the sight. “Sunglasses help with the light, shitty as it is in here,” he says, dropping his back into place, “if you’re having issues with it. They hide the whole busted capillaries mess too.”

Hermann hesitates, not sure what to say. This conversation feels too careful for the two of them, and as irritating as the near-constant shouted arguing was, he misses it in the face of the awkwardly stilted way that they are now speaking, the way that they are not speaking of their Drift.

“There is less shouting currently happening than I thought would be happening,” Newton says with an odd synchronization to his own thoughts that Hermann does not like in the _slightest_ , “considering that I dragged your brain through—“

“No,” Hermann says firmly, “there was no _dragging_ , you utter _imbecile_ ,” and then he has to breathe through his nose until he no longer feels the need to violently berate Newton in German.

“How are you doing?” Newton says.

Hermann could identify the organs floating around him as easily as the equations he has written on his blackboards. His eye is throbbing in time with his head. He doesn’t know how many of his neural pathways have been overwritten by Newton’s, and he is afraid to know if any of them have been pulled apart and put back together by the creature that nearly ate Newton. He can’t tell if he is tired and jumpy or if something has replaced his own blown mental fuses with ones tinted brilliant blue. He doesn’t know how much of Newt remains Newt, and he doesn’t know if Newt knows. Hermann, who has had half the exposure to alien neural pathways that Newton has, thinks he can feel phantom frost creeping through whatever had happened to him when he looked at the specimen tank and into the edges of his conscious thoughts.

“Fine,” he says, and pretends that he is not lying.

 

Hermann’s next days proceed as uneventfully as any days following an aborted apocalypse would. He gets up the following morning after staring at the ceiling instead of sleeping for the rest of the night and spends a minute or two thinking about going to the mess hall for tea instead of putting on water himself before one of Newton’s preferences surfaces and he winds up on his way to LOCCENT and Tendo’s coffee pot.

Tendo isn’t there, but the coffee in the machine is hot. Curious, Hermann wanders further into the room with his borrowed mug to find Marshal Hansen is sitting on one of the desks overlooking the Jaeger bays.

The bays are still and empty, a majority of the technicians that are usually kept busy there outside, helping with the efforts to dredge up the remains of the Jaegers left in the water.

Hermann offers a weakly inadequate, “I’m sorry,” when Hansen looks over at him.

He sighs and gestures for Hermann to sit down by him.

“Will you stay?” he asks abruptly.

Hansen looks hungover and tired, bruises still prominently staining his cheekbones and eye sockets. He looks like a man in need of peaceful retirement, or at the very least a long vacation, and he looks like a man that knows at his very core that there is a non-zero probability that the Breach will open again.

Max snuffles from below the desk.

“I think so,” Hermann says quietly, watching an arc of faraway sparks jump up from a metal grinder below them.

 

Hermann dreams, more blue coursing along circuitry and through a red sky and into grey matter. He wakes up shaking, cold and bleeding again. There is borrowed biologically-based knowledge of sleep deprivation sitting in his mind, and he ignores it in favor of putting a sweater on and —

— and he turns towards his door without thinking about it.

Someone knocks on it.

He frowns.

It isn’t quite déjà vu, but it’s close.

He really doesn’t like it.

When Hermann pulls open the door with a half-snarled, “ _What?_ ” muffled through the handkerchief covering most of his face to see Newton standing there, he is, as he so often is when faced with Newton, filled with regret.

“Um,” Newton says. “Can I come in?”

“Oh,” Hermann says. “Yes.”

 

The PPDC has not allotted their staff enough space for anything resembling a couch. Hermann does have two chairs, but they are currently playing at being bookshelves, so they sit on the edge of Hermann’s bed, and they sit there in silence.

They don’t touch, but it’s enough.

Hermann doesn’t recognize it then, but Newton’s presence lessens the subtle seaward pull left in his thoughts, resets his broken internal compass to align with the poles of this world instead of salt and the lull of the waves that hide a fissure’s magnetic drag.

Newton drops his head onto Hermann’s shoulder and it’s not like the Drift — _nothing is like the Drift —_ but it feels like popping a dislocated joint into alignment.

The next time he takes a breath, Newton breathes in with him.

For the moment, breathing is all they need to do, beginning to settle into new identity and a selfhood warped by a third hemisphere lined in blue on a paired system. Hermann lets himself hope that they will be alright.

“I don’t think we can play chess anymore,” Newton tells the ground.

Hermann picks up the thread of conversation too easily, even as he says, “It is not a real-time connection.”

“Mmn,” Newton replies, entirely noncommittal, and Hermann has to wonder at what is going through his head at that moment. “I always let you win, anyways.”

Hermann snorts, trying not to jostle the other man, and it feels like a weight lifted from his chest. “You have never let me win,” he says.

“Every single time,” Newton replies. “How else would you win so often?”

“Chess is not a game that you can cheat at,” Hermann says, “as much as you like to pretend otherwise.”

Newton laughs himself off of Hermann’s shoulder, completely fails to engage any of the core muscles meant to keep him safely upright, and flops across Hermann’s lap.

Hermann freezes.

Newton’s laughter fades into giggles, but he doesn’t sit back up again. “Y’know,” he says, still talking to the ground, “I’m starting to think there’s something to the whole drifting thing.”

Hermann ever so carefully settles a hand on Newton’s shoulder. “Miss Mori and Mister Becket closed the Breach with ‘the whole drifting thing,’” he says.

“Sure,” Newton says, “but you’re bleeding from the face region every time I walk by your room.”

He leans into Hermann’s hand and allows for his hair to be gently rearranged before he rolls his head towards Hermann. Newton is still wearing his sunglasses and when Hermann goes to move them from where they’re out of place and pressing into the bridge of Newton’s nose, he flinches away before they’re off. “Eyes are still, you know, gross,” Newton says, pushing them back up his nose.

“Sorry,” Hermann says. He tries and fails to make eye contact through the dark glass before he asks, “Why _were_ you walking by my room?”

“Felt jumpy,” Newton says and turns himself away towards the floor again. “Been sleeping badly,” he continues, trailing off, and Hermann can’t tell if that fragment ends with a period or a question mark.

Hermann thinks about drifting and the quiet in his head and doesn’t answer.

“I’m leaving,” Newton says, “in the morning.”

Hermann keeps carding his fingers through Newton’s hair, easing strands out of knots of gel. “Oh,” he says.

 

Newton does leave in the morning.

He takes one of the plants that live in the lab and bequeaths the rest to Mako, who does not provide further comment on his decision beyond what Hermann assumes to be a bone-crushing hug and some aggressively whispered Japanese. He gives some of his books to Hermann by leaving them on his side of the yellow line in their lab without mentioning it. His laptop goes, but the most of the junk on his desk stays, and Hermann pokes through it by the end of the day, even though Newton has deemed clearing it a rite of passage for the next person to inhabit the desk.

He watches Newton clamber into a helicopter, shoulders hunched in his black jacket against the spray that the rotors kick up, eyes still shielded behind sunglasses.

Hermann forgets to ask if Newton has seen his own glasses.

He pockets the recorder Newton has left in the lab, intending to transcribe any notes he finds on it in order to email the man anything important. He files away the loose papers he finds and doesn’t vomit when he helps the new hires move kaiju remains to a different room.

Later that night when he is alone in his room, he does throw up when he listens to Newton’s most recent recording.

His first frantic email receives no reply, and the others don’t either, but they never bounce off of a closed inbox, so Hermann sits alone and bleeds alone, sometimes hoping that Newt reads them.

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutout to the lovely folks on discord that helped proofread!
> 
> Come visit me on tumblr at astralgeckos.tumblr.com if you want to say hi or tell me about how commas actually work.


End file.
